Chapter 1 - FPGA Overview: Architecture and CAD

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of field programmable gate array (FPGA). FPGAs were designed to complement application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs by providing reprogrammability on the expense of power dissipation, chip area, and performance. The main advantages of FPGAs compared to ASIC designs are—FPGAs' time-to-market is minimal when compared to ASIC designs. Once a fully tested design is available, the design can be burned into the FPGA and verified; hence, initiating the production phase. As a result, FPGAs eliminate the fabrication wait time, FPGAs are excellent candidates for low-volume productions since they eliminate the mask generation cost, FPGAs are ideal for prototyping purposes. Hardware testing and verification can be quickly performed on the chip. Moreover, design errors can be easily fixed without incurring any additional hardware costs, and FPGAs are versatile and reprogrammable, thus allowing them to be used in several designs at no additional costs. The CAD tools of FPGAs transform the design, entered either as a schematic or using a hardware description language, to a stream of “1”s and “0”s that program the FPGA during the configuration time.